Perception

When we say that a machine (and notably a digital work of art) "perceives" something, that is not to say that is does it consciously, like a human being, but that it extracts from what he gets from the external wold some data that it can use to behave and produce.

Perception is a process with levels. The best expression of this progression is the "data fusion" model of the DOD (Department of Defense), of which we show here a synthtetic view taken from Information Warfare. Principles and Operations, by Edward Walts (Artech 1998).

Low level: sensors

At the basic, hardware, level are the sensor, be it in live beings or in machines.

Sensors include hardware and software parts.

The hardware part transforms any input into rasters of binary values; for most sensors, the raster has time as one its dimension, the second one as a sample value; typically: amplitude of a sound wave, wind speed; image sensors provide a series of 2 dimensions images, each pixel being more or less deeply coded (from one bit for black white to 24 bits and more for color images).
Elaborate sensor systems include mechanical moves of the capturing device, for example the rotations of a radar antenna or the complex moves of human vision.

Today, cameras and microphones
are cheap sensors, potentially powerful if used with high level software. Combined
interfaces like the Kinect offer today easy
to use (including open source software) sensing devices. But in fact, even today
many "interactive" works of art have nothing more than some switch
or cell to detect a presence.

The software part includes the drivers for the hardware, but more importantly
deals with coding.

Higher level: coding

This basic level provides rasters of values (see form). But, more importantly, the software transform the raster into meaningful code. It recognizes patterns, detect beings, evaluate audience attitudes in order to feed the coding level of the work. Some detection and recognition code is provided freely by OpenCV. For living beings, these functions are dealt with in specific brain areas.

[Aziosmanoff] who uses the term restrictively (perception of the public by the work) insists on this point for a higher design of work of art.

In transmedia, "Just as the brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature - a face, a figure, a flower - and in sound, so too it detects patterns in information" ( [Rose], p. 1).

Perception of the public by an interactive work must go beyond a mere perception of its presence; what matters is attitude, attention, behavior of the audience, as explains Aziosmanoff. Here a work by Lozano-Hemmer, shown at Gaité Lyrique (Paris). Using function of Open-CV type, the work detects sufficiently stable eyes, and then burns them into smoke.